The Fun of Words and the Curse of Acronyms

A responsible person would launch a blog like this here Sugar Creek Theology by tackling a real catastrophe like AI-driven human extinction. But I begin by admitting I’m a one-man society for the abolition of acronyms. Yes, those little blights like GPA, EMMC, GDP, USA, SBC, EFC, CCCC, MCC, BLO, ABHE, CHEC and DGR littering our language that stand in when we no longer have patience for the names. Who has time to keep saying Canadian Council of Christian Charities all day long? Government agencies are obscene in their production of acronyms. Like the HSTJWSTTP. If you don’t know what that is, Google it, I don’t have time to explain.

And there’s the first problem with acronyms. They reveal whether you are in or out, even for organizations that badly want you in. To casually whiff an acronym across the room signals you are in the know, and it quickly exposes those who are ignorant. Which is handy but a bit mean.

              I was surprised to discover how recent these noxious weeds are. According to Wikipedia, “The widespread, frequent use of acronyms across the whole range of registers is a relatively new linguistic phenomenon in most languages, becoming increasingly evident since the mid-20th century.” Apparently whole societies existed happily for ages without them. I recall Ian McGilchrist claiming in The Master and His Emissary that the prevalence of acronyms is a Soviet invention. He sees their rise as a symptom of the left-brain, mechanical, bureaucratic mind, dominating our world. May I rest my case?

              But another problem with acronyms is that they taste like egg whites. A word should be like a barbequed steak—smoked in the juices of a thousand predeceased wieners. An acronym as a word has no flavour, no backstory, no connotation to enrich it. It’s a symbol of a symbol, like the sealed communion packs from Amazon that were the pandemic symbol for the symbol of the Lord’s Supper.

I work at Steinbach Bible College which gets shortened to SBC. ‘Steinbach’, ‘Bible’ and ‘College’ are all solid, interesting words with deep history, but ‘SBC’ is a nothing-word. I envy colleges that shorten to Providence, Regent, or Wycliffe, words with centuries of seasoning in them. Whoever says the word ess-bee-cee and thinks of anything?

The problem starts when we name stuff. If you call yourself the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, you already know your name is doomed to reduction. The problem is that saying ‘AMBS’ does not evoke ‘Associated’ or ‘Mennonite’ or ‘Biblical’ or ‘Seminary’. And when, as happened, you change the ‘A’ to stand for ‘Anabaptist’, no one even notices. Those words all mean good things but ‘AMBS’ does not mean them. Why intentionally call yourself a word that tastes like your spit? So one solution to this blight is to choose names that shorten to their first word, not to their first letters. Like Tyndale or Fuller or Old Church.

              So, we break out in acronyms when we give our organizations long, pompous, bureaucratic, names and then in the name of exclusion and bloodless efficiency substitute a cold symbol of a symbol instead.

              But rather! Why not recover the divine fun of words? God likes words. Our words. Like flabbergasted or humdudgeon. Why does crackerjack crackle in the air like it does? Don't you feel a sonic fun in that sound? That little aural buzz gets mixed in with the memory and taste of the popcorn rattling in the boxes. So tell your pastor that you are flabbergasted, but that crackerjack sermon ended your morning humdudgeon.

              Humans are sentence-performing animals. We love the sound of words spilling out, like a gymnastic routine, rebounding, tumbling, springing, to mean out there what we think in here. We like saying things because saying things in a sentence is making meaning-- physical, sonic meaning--out of the bits and pieces of the world we see about us. We make meaning out of thin air, like God.

              God likes our words. He created the worlds with the breath of words. Centuries of creation, redemption, judgement and consumation are written for us by God in our words in scripture. The Bible has no acronyms. The Spirit says out every syllable. We have a wordy God who takes the time to reveal himself truthfully in lively sentences. I suspect God winces every time he hears KJV.

              So take time to use your words. Words take patience. Let's give fancy names to things that are fun to say all day long, and that carry more depth than first meets the ear.

In the town of Seminole Texas where I grew up we had three grocery stores. One was Wackers, the second Piggley Wiggley, and the third Henny Penny. Texans are no soviets, that’s for ding dang.

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